In recent years, social media services and other online communication services have become increasingly important avenues for human expression and communication. For many individuals, online platforms have become a primary method by which they communicate. Such services include, without limitation, Facebook®, YouTube®, Instagram®, Snapchat®, WhatsApp®, Twitter®, Telegram®, Discord®, and online forums and chatrooms.
Sharing personal moments with friends, family, and the public through electronic means, in various formats including image, video and text, has brought people closer together by providing a glimpse into the life experiences of one another. This value is increased proportionately as individual posts are shared to more than just one friend at a time. When sharing such personal moments, users tend to edit them, both consciously and subconsciously, to try to make those moments look good. One of the most powerful ways users edit shared moments is through self-selection of which of their moments to share. For example, individuals tend to capture and/or share moments they think would be interesting to others, or that make their lives look interesting, such as vacation moments, special events, or moments they are doing something noteworthy or in which they think they look good or interesting.
More recently, as the world of simplified photo filters exploded that make us and our photos look better or more interesting than real life, combined with mass sharing and the seeking of likes and other feedback from followers, personal posts became synonymous with highlights and increasingly, with inauthenticity. In extreme but all too common situations, users engage in a race to see whose lives look better. This pervasive inauthenticity has started a counter trend to post content of a more authentic nature, particularly among digital natives whose digital and real lives are intertwined.
To some, this trend might be thought of as a way to cleanse one's psyche by showing a real side of one's life, or as a way to reinforce the idea that friends like us for who we truly are in our unfiltered, non-edited moments, in direct contrast to what we might share on common social platforms in the race for social validation. One example of this counter trend toward authenticity was the emergence of ephemeral photos and videos such as those made popular by Snapchat and later incorporated by Instagram, Facebook, and others, which tend to foster more authentic, less edited posts. Another trend was the emergence of fake accounts on Instagram (often referred to as Finsta accounts), considered far more private than traditional accounts and therefore safer for posting your real, unedited and often unflattering but still personally meaningful moments.
But while these ephemeral and more private methods of sharing foster greater authenticity than their early social media predecessors, they still maintain perhaps the most powerful editorial filter of all, the user's ability to fully control which of their personal moments to share. We start doing this simply by choosing which moments to take out our devices and capture, and if we don't share these instantly, we subsequently do this again by choosing which of our previously captured moments (e.g. from our camera roll) to post on social media (whether one-to-many or one-to-one posts). Without consciously recognizing it, this means many more authentic, less planned moments of our lives go uncaptured and unshared. The candid, non-posed, unplanned moments that would often serve as the most accurate reflection and reminder of what our lives were really like slip by undocumented. All the while, sharing the more authentic moments from our lives would allow us to grow even closer with our true friends by knowing what one another are really experiencing, and reflecting on our own authentic moments later in life would provide a richer, more meaningful memory of our actual journey.